Is there anything I don't write down? I know. But I have the craziest dreams – way beyond your basic freefalling or showing up to work naked stuff – and years ago in therapy dream analysis was, well, not exactly enlightening but surely a lot of fun. I keep a record of the ones I can actually remember long enough to record in the conscious realm, and they go back years.

A recurring setting for many of my dreams is my high school, like these:

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November 14, 1992

I am the new debate coach at Heritage Hall. It is the first day of class, and I am delivering the basic introductory prep talk, focusing on the idea that I would teach them how to debate without letting emotions inhibit the intellect. After class, Livy Evans – sister of my classmate Katy Evans, a new staffer at The Daily at this time – approaches me with wide, hopeful, innocent, childlike eyes, clutching her books to her chest, and asks me, “You’ll fight the good fight, won’t you? We all will, won’t we?”

November 15, 1992

I am superhero Green Lantern. A group of evil zealots is attempting to cast a spell on the Heritage Hall Upper School building and thus sanctify it as a temple, from which they will base their operations and nefarious deeds. An unidentified friend of mine is The Flash, another DC Comics superhero, and we are defending the empty building. At one moment in the altercation, I swoop through the air down toward a group of zealots gathered on the sidewalk outside the door near the debate room. They are chanting, and I vividly recall myself poised in mid-air, with that graceful sprawl of superheroes, pointing my powerful ring at them.

December 8, 1993

Scene One: Burt Reynolds is a father, and an older, pear-shaped woman is the mother. Their teen-aged daughter is tortured by a roar that she frequently hears in the sky. Sometimes she also sees a glowing orb in the sky. It frightens her, and she’s convinced it is some ominous sign. She is the pilot of some craft that looks like Delorean without wheels. One night, while standing next to her craft in the parking lot on the south side of the Heritage Hall gymnasium, she hears the roar and sees the orb simultaneously. Scene Two: Burt and his wife are talking to me at that same location, outside the men’s locker room door, as they climb into their conversion van. The mother is telling me that they once had a daughter who believed that humans had eaten of a forbidden fruit which cursed us to always look into the past. The girl had departed recently, flown off after saying, “You can stay and eat the fruit; I’m going to find the future,” leaving behind a green apple. The three of us sit in the van and eat the apple, which is juicy and tastes delicious.

June 22, 1996

I have joined a covert band of vigilantes that attacks smokers and tobacco companies. My motives for joining seem somehow insincere, as if I feel personally ambivalent about the issue but have joined at the urging or pressure of someone else. The group is meeting in a dark, trashy basement, and we are plotting action against a tobacco company truck. We set out on this mission, and we emerge onto Western Avenue in Oklahoma City near the intersection at 115th St., the road that leads to Heritage Hall. The group begins trotting south down Western, but my attention is arrested by a flatbed trailer that has pulled to the east shoulder off Western right across from 115th. The open-air trailer bed is carpeted and furnished as an antique bedroom. Standing in a lacy, light blue nightgown at an old-fashioned square microphone is Nina Persson, the lead singer for the Cardigans. She’s performing something from Evita. I turn away and catch up with the group, but later I return. Now she is sitting by the side of the road showing Mark Brown, my friend and colleague, some chords on a tinny, old dobro. Snow is now falling, piling up on the trailer set, and I take Nina’s hand, leading her further east from the road into a hot, steamy, grassy marsh where we make love.

January 18, 1998

It’s night, and I’ve been driving around with Venus Flytrap and Andy Travis (characters from WKRP in Cincinnati), in Venus’s car. We return to the Heritage Hall campus, parking between the Middle School and the Adminstration Building. We walk back slowly along the sidewalk between the Middle and Upper schools; we’re mostly silent, huffing and sighing as if it’s been a long day, but we take our time as if feeling a bit carefree. Outside the Upper School we stop to observe a bronze statue atop a long, shoulder-high concrete base. It’s Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, standing behind and firing a long cannon while also aiming a rifle with a barrel about as long as the cannon. We’re a bit dumbfounded by the presence of this statue, particularly by the plaques all around it that read, “Joseph Smith – Scientist,” “Joseph Smith – Healer,” “Joseph Smith – Educator,” all the while depicting him at war. I climb on the statue and swing for a moment off his gun barrel. Then we go inside the school – I enter the door on the south side of the commons while Venus and Andy enter a door in the corner of the commons (that door does not exist). I go upstairs and walk through the halls, but I am uneasy because the looks has changed somewhat – more cluttered and cramped. I return to the commons in search of Venus; I need to tell him not to leave before I can get my wallet out of his car. I find him in the commons restroom in a heated argument with someone, with several people standing around watching.

December 2, 2001

I am hosting and emceeing a huge gala party in honor of Chris Champlin, an old Heritage Hall classmate who I hardly knew. He has done something really spectacular apparently, and a huge crowd has come together to fete him. It’s a black-tie party, and it’s in the HH Lower School gymnasium (with that funky rubber floor). And it’s wild. There’s a big jazz band on stage really wailing, and a bunch of that metallic-looking confetti is raining down over the packed house. People are whooping and jumping up and down. As the host, I’m watching it all and am very pleased. When the band finishes, I take the stage to make an announcement, maybe to introduce Champlin. While I’m there, Richard Cockrill, another classmate acquaintance, is tripping his way up the stage stairs to my left. He’s drunk out of his mind, and he seems determined to get on stage, getting to the point where he almost grabs the microphone from me before being pushed back by security or someone. Then there was some kind of coda to the dream: It was late that night or early the next morning, after the party was over, and I realize that I missed a very funny opportunity, that I should have had Champlin or the band do Neil Diamond’s “America” (a song Champlin sang at a pep rally once to great comic effect). I regret the oversight.